George Meredith (1828 – 1909)
English novelist and poet.
More brain, O Lord, more brain! or we shall mar
Utterly this fair garden we might win.
She [Comedy] it is who proposes the correcting of pretentiousness, of inflation, of dulness, and of the vestiges of rawness and grossness to be found among us. She is the ultimate civilizer, the polisher, a sweet cook.
In tragic life, God wot,
No villain need be! Passions spin the plot:
We are betrayed by what is false within.
Speech is the small change of Silence.
First of earthly singers, the sun-loved rill.
A witty woman is a treasure; a witty beauty is a power.
Cannon his name,
Cannon his voice, he came.
And if I drink oblivion of a day,
So shorten I the stature of my soul.
It's past parsons to console us:
No, nor no doctor fetch for me:
I can die without my bolus;
Two of a trade, lass, never agree!
Parson and Doctor!--don't they love rarely
Fighting the devil in other men's fields!
Stand up yourself and match him fairly:
Then see how the rascal yields!
Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul
When hot for certainties in this our life! -
In tragic hints here see what evermore
Moves dark as yonder midnight ocean's force,
Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse,
To throw that faint thin fine upon the shore!
The actors are, it seems, the usual three:
Husband and wife and lover.
Cynicism is intellectual dandyism.
Ireland gives England her soldiers, her generals too.
The song seraphically free
Of taint of personality,
So pure that it salutes the suns
The voice of one for millions,
In whom the millions rejoice
For giving their one spirit voice.
Who rises from prayer a better man, his prayer is answered.
God's rarest blessing is, after all, a good woman!
Full lasting is the song, though he,
The singer, passes.
I've studied men from my topsy-turvy
Close, and I reckon, rather true.
Some are fine fellows: some, right scurvy;
Most, a dash between the two.
There is nothing the body suffers that the soul may not profit by.
Enter these enchanted woods,
You who dare.
Nothing harms beneath the leaves
More than waves a swimmer cleaves.
Toss your heart up with the lark,
Foot at peace with mouse and worm,
Fair you fare.
Only at a dread of dark
Quaver, and they quit their form:
Thousand eyeballs under hoods
Have you by the hair.
Enter these enchanted woods,
You who dare.